Ian Almond

On his book Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched with Christians across Europe’s Battlegrounds

Cover Interview of April 28, 2009

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“The idea of a Christian Europe is simply a case of historical amnesia.”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“Some of the first English (Anglo-Saxon) coins had the stamp of the Caliphate on them.”

On the second:

“Even on a much more anecdotal level – Da Vinci’s recently discovered Turkish/Arab mother, for example – we are becoming more and more aware of the interrelationship between Europe and the Middle East.”

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016